Fifty years ago, if the right decisions had been made, today might look very different. We likely would not be talking about a "climate crisis" or a "climate emergency."
But the right decisions were not made. Instead, our capitalist rulers pushed ahead with their growth-at-any-cost mantra. And now we face certain disaster.
There are still choices to made, a struggle to be waged, in hopes of making the collapse of society slightly less costly for some people in some places. We must engage in that fight.
But suffering is inevitable, great suffering, both for humans and for the natural environment that our industries and our consumerism are in the process of destroying.
Here is an article by Indi Samarajiva that traces our history of bad decisions and that describes "What ‘Winning’ Against Climate Change Actually Looks Like." As he warns, you won't like it.
Geoffrey Deihl, aka Sane Thinker (@gdeihl), carefully analyzes various economic plans to combat climate change, including the Green New Deal, and contrasts them with his preferred option: Degrowth.
This is a fully researched and superbly reasoned article. I'll post a few excerpts below, but I hope you'll read the whole thing.
Capitalism, particularly neoliberal capitalism and its resulting increased consumption, have pushed the planet to the brink. Nibbling at the edges of the problem is woefully inadequate.
Climate scientists are stunned by the melting Arctic ice sheet, for instance, which is decades ahead of original models. The Antarctic ice sheet is now melting as well. The oceans are currently experiencing an unexpected and shocking temperature rise in a matter of months, not years. Scientists are unsure if this is related to the return of El Niño, or if it could be an entirely new tipping point they were unaware of.
The truth is that without significant, perhaps profound changes to how we live in so-called advanced industrial nations, we’re going to fail to halt global warming at an adequate pace with current efforts, and failure will lead to a crash that none of our sadly popular apocalyptic movies can prepare us for.
We’re in a climate emergency now, the word crisis is no longer appropriate. The strongest possible actions need to be taken as quickly as possible. Delay is death.
We need to dismantle billionaires and accept that we commoners also need to be prepared for changes, as we adjust to living in a gentler way on the planet. We can sacrifice again, as we did during WWII, for an ultimately a better future. We will not save the planet merely by driving electric versions of SUVs that look like the solution in slick advertising spots.
Degrowth recognizes a simple truth. The planet is finite. Infinite growth is an impossibility on a finite world.
Reducing our consumption and ever-growing energy demands is key, if we are to have a future. This is one of the fundamentals the Green New Deal, Build Back Better, and IRA miss. All the batteries in the world will be insufficient if we don’t bring our consumption under control. In addition to building out renewables, we must reduce our energy use. Degrowth recognizes that economic growth without destruction of nature is impossible, and the destruction of nature guarantees our own destruction.
Someone popped into my mentions yesterday and tried to argue that we can and should respond to the climate catastrophe by changing our consumption patterns—reducing, reusing, and recycling; carpooling; buying from artisans rather than big firms; etc.
Undoubtedly, many of us could improve the way we buy and use stuff and thereby nibble away at the margins of the climate problem. But no, we are not going to solve problems like “sequential heat waves that kill at least tens of thousands of people every summer” by recycling our glass bottles.
What I really want to talk about, though, is the idea that our pattern of purchases and use is somehow a neutral and organic expression of our preferences that we can just adjust on a whim. It’s not.
The annual wildfire season in Canada is coming to an end. Or, anyway, it should be by now.
But 2023 is unlike any other year. As of yesterday, there were more than 900 fires still burning, over half of them out of control.
Look at the area burned in the second graph below. The damage to wildlife is literally incalculable. Greenhouse gas emissions from all of these fires is off the charts.
Sure, some reply guy will tell you that forest fires are normal and natural and necessary. But not like this. What we’re seeing this year is an unnatural catastrophe caused by human industry — by the oil companies, their financiers, and the governments that support and subsidize them.
It’s a crime. It’s ecocide. And you know what? To them, it’s just Business As Usual.
5.3 metres – the degree of sea level rise now unavoidable from West Antarctic Ice Sheet melting ALONE – is sufficient to entirely submerge most of urban Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai, and an enormous area of southern Iraq (Qatar gets off surprisingly lightly).
It can be argued that electric vehicles are an improvement when replacing ICE vehicles.
But that misses a much bigger point — which is that the very best car is not an electric car. The very best car is no car at all!
Building electric cars requires massive use of fossil fuels, including petrochemicals for the manufacture of plastics. In addition, mining of lithium for batteries as well as trawling for other minerals in the deep ocean is environmentally disastrous, killing biodiversity while polluting our water, soil, and air.
The kind of “Green Growth” championed by capitalists and politicians, which features more electric cars, a bit of solar, and a few wind farms — along with continued use of fossil fuels — is not a good answer. It does not solve any of our problems, and in fact only makes them worse.
Say NO to more cars, of any kind. Push instead for active transportation and for improved public transit.
Continued economic growth is unsustainable. Period. The only logical choice for us and for the biosphere is de-growth.
Destroying the planet we live on -- the only planet we can live on -- is of course totally legal and even supported and subsidised by governments around the world (including #Scotland's).
But PROTESTING against destroying the planet? That's illegal. That's very, very illegal. Don't even think about doing that.
A perfect (and perfectly scary) title from Jessica Wildfire (@jessicawildfire) —
"If a Cactus Can't Survive This, Neither Can You"
You might’ve seen recent headlines about saguaro cacti keeling over in Arizona after spending nearly a month above 110° Fahrenheit (43°C).
Not even a week later, The Washington Post ran this absurd story: “Your body can build up tolerance to heat. Here’s how.”
I’m not linking to it. That’s how bad it is.
It’s not just getting a little hotter. It’s getting so hot that saguaro cacti are deflating in the desert. They evolved roughly 20,000 years ago. They’ve spent millennia adapting to a hot desert environment. They live up to 200 years in the hottest, driest environments on the planet. These cactuses are saying, “I can’t take it anymore,” and sagging over dead.
And we’re being told we can adapt.
I got curious about what temperature the human body can actually withstand, and it’s somewhere around 108°F (42°C). That’s when your proteins start to denature. A wet bulb temperature beyond 95°F (35°C) can kill a person in about six hours. No amount of heat tolerance can save anyone from that.
It strikes me as just a little ridiculous that out here in reality, parts of the world are becoming absolutely uninhabitable, and wellness writers are just now telling us to start building up our heat tolerance.
It feels like we’re being prepared and conditioned to start blaming heat deaths on someone’s “low heat tolerance,” as if it’s just another precondition that helps them rationalize indifference in the face of mass death.
Scientists are now saying we are “out of time” to keep global heating at under 1.5°C. It’s simply too late. We’ve delayed any action far too long.
All our talk and meetings and phony “Net Zero” pledges don’t mean anything to an overstressed climate system that is rapidly breaking down.
You can’t fool Mother Nature.
The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.
“We’ve run out of time because change takes time,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climatologist at Australia’s University of New South Wales.
As climate envoys from the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters prepare to meet next month, temperatures broke June records in the Chinese capital Beijing, and extreme heat waves have hit the United States.
Parts of North America were some 10C (18F) above the seasonal average this month, and smoke from forest fires blanketed Canada and the US East Coast in a hazardous haze, with carbon emissions estimated at a record 160 million tons.
In India, one of the most climate-vulnerable regions, deaths spiked as a result of sustained high temperatures, and extreme heat has been recorded in Spain, Iran, and Vietnam, raising fears that last year’s deadly summer could become routine.
Countries agreed in Paris in 2015 to try to keep long-term average temperature rises within 1.5C, but there is now a 66% likelihood the annual mean will cross the 1.5C threshold for at least one whole year between now and 2027, the World Meteorological Organization predicted in May.
Too many people, even here on Mastodon, seem to be in denial about how bad things are likely to get on our current path. I suppose I can understand how they might wish the situation was different, and perhaps some of them aren't psychologically or emotionally ready to handle an honest look at the dire future we face, so they simply avoid it.
But I worry that almost everyone will be unprepared for the collapse of our fragile modern society when it comes.
I’ll be blunt. We have no hope of averting climate chaos or preventing the catastrophic collapse of our modern society without SYSTEM CHANGE.
Keeping capitalism in charge means a death sentence for billions of humans — most of them poor and in the Global South — along with complete extinction for uncounted plant and animal species.
The fake “democracy” we have in the Global North is nothing but a game show owned and produced by oligarchs. As long as they remain in control of the system, nothing meaningful will change. How you vote doesn’t matter, because every important candidate is approved in advance, vetted and managed by those men behind the curtain.
Either capitalism dies or we die. It’s that simple.
The US government is pouring billions into this concept, not because they think it will ever work — they know it won't — but because it allows them to pretend they're doing something positive about the climate crisis, while in reality they're telling their fossil fuel buddies that Business As Usual is here to stay.
And it's working. Corporate news outlets are on board promoting the plan, and everyone is happy. 😃
Especially the oil industry!
Here's a quote from Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum:
“We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
For once, an oil executive is NOT lying. She's telling the truth, and that truth is going to kill us all.
In case you didn't already know, Net Zero is a scam promoted by the fossil fuel industry and their financiers to perpetuate Business As Usual for as long as possible...
"Why Net Zero is not enough"
More than 4,000 governments and companies around the world have pledged to go Net Zero. This includes more than one-third of the world’s largest publicly traded companies.
That sounds like a step in the right direction, right? If every organisation “stops emitting”, our world will be great again.
Well, not exactly…
If we continue to be in a collective delusion that Net Zero is the solution, we will be proved terribly wrong.
In "Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough", Holly Jean Buck discusses the implications of chasing Net Zero from various frames — looking at it not only through an environmental lens but a social justice perspective as well.
Instead of telling us to do better, this book provides different stakeholders concrete steps for planned phase-out on top of sound arguments and justification for it.
Simply put, the framework of Net Zero and its concentration on emissions diverts public and policy attention away from the fundamental task of ensuring effective and lasting climate change mitigation, which requires an unwavering end to the fossil fuel sector.
Hier eine kleine selbstreflexive Beobachtung zu einem „Experiment“ in Sachen Höchstgeschwindigkeit.
Ich bin heute nach vielen Monaten mal wieder (gezwungenermaßen) mit dem Auto gefahren. Die Route ist knappe 40 km lang, etwa ein Drittel davon Autobahn, der Rest Landstraße unterbrochen von mehreren Ortsgebieten. Werden die geltenden Tempolimits ausgereizt, so bräuchte ich etwas mehr als 40 Minuten. Heute bin ich auf der Autobahn (maximal!) 100 km/h, auf der Landstraße 80 km/h gefahren. Hier einige Beobachtungen:
Der durchschnittliche Treibstoffverbrauch geht in den Keller. Ich brauche deutlich weniger Sprit und verblase somit auch weniger CO2-Emissionen.
Ich fahre konzentrierter/entspannter. Mir fallen verschiedene Dinge (potenzielle Gefahren?) früher auf und ich kann schneller reagieren, was die Sicherheit erhöht.
Doch am interessantesten ist, dass ich kaum länger gebraucht habe; nämlich ziemlich genau 45 Minuten. Das ist ein Unterschied von maximal 4 Minuten auf 40 Kilometer.
Fazit: Ein Tempolimit „100-80-30“ ist keine Schikane, sondern in jeder Hinsicht plausibel. Energie wird gespart, Umwelt wird (ein bisschen mehr) geschont, Sicherheit wird erhöht und die Reisezeit steigt kaum. Eine solche Maßnahme wäre schnell umgesetzt und ein schonendes Mittel. Außerdem lernt man eigentlich schon in der Fahrschule, genügend Zeit einzuplanen, um Stress im Straßenverkehr zu vermeiden. Ganz ehrlich. Wer nicht 5 Minuten mehr aufbringen kann, sollte nicht die Fahrgeschwindigkeit, sondern generell seinihr Leben in Sachen Zeitmanagement anpassen. Wenn also „100-80-30“ die Menschen so sehr verängstigt, dann haben wir wahrlich keine echten Ängste. Allerdings: Die Klimakrise ist jetzt schon ein beängstigendes Problem. Auch in Mitteleuropa, wie es zu sehen ist.
PS: 100-80-30 ist übrigens eine der Hauptforderungen von Klimaaktivistinnen. Nein, diese Forderung ist nicht radikal. #tempolimit#klimakrise#climateemergency#mobilität#mobility#noplanetb
EDIT: After numerous comments, I realized that I should have been more specific about that. Because plenty of people DO care, but it seems our governments and the US corporate media do not.
Is it possible that our super-advanced modern global civilization actually could collapse? Or is this just hyperbolic clickbait, intended for doom-scrolling?
Michael T. Klare is professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Most recently, he is the author of "All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change."
In an essay published today, Professor Klare has a warning for us --
"We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse"